Moth Stories

Moth Stories

© Leonora Liow, 2015

ISBN: 978-981-09-3758-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-981-14-0895-3 (e-book)

Published under the imprint Ethos Books

by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

28 Sin Ming Lane #06-131

Singapore 573972

www.ethosbooks.com.sg

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The publisher reserves all rights to this title.

Cover Design by Gabriele Wilson

Cover Photograph by Ralph Gibson

Design and layout by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Liow, Leonora.

Moth stories / Leonora Liow. – Singapore : Ethos Books, [2015]

pages cm

ISBN : 978-981-09-3758-4 (paperback)

I. Title.

PR9570.S53

S823 -- dc23

OCN899201689

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For Ju Seng

and

For Xiang and Mei

Contents

Falling Water

Blink

Jigsaw

Rich Man Country

Clara

Cufflinks

Moth

Tell Me

A Modern Girl’s Quandary

Majulah Singapura

About The Author

About the Imprint

Falling Water

When they told me I could visit I almost spat at them. Now we sit across from each other, like any other couple married too long to make conversation. Who would have thought one year could bring so much change.

And when time’s up and we gather our things and make believe we are relatives at a home, I am sure you feel it too, the collusion, that this is such a place of charity and good intention, with hospital orderlies disguised as guards.

I no longer wonder what you think of as you lie and stare at the ceiling or the underside of a bunk. I am too busy now with the day-to-day. My show carries on, you see, having an audience, even if neither is home. Even if they are, we are lodgers sharing accommodation, wordless and detached from one another’s doings. I make a meal—rice, a soup. I pile my plate, go to my room. The rest is left to congeal in case someone gets hungry. If we are to talk about progress you might say we have made some: our son sometimes helps himself. This I know from the diminished remains. I look for forgiveness in such an act. I have not yet earned the right to ask our daughter to eat. Sometimes a wild hope springs: the possibility that we might be seated at the same time to a meal, even if like strangers at a food court randomly huddled at the last available table. I have not yet made the great leap of inserting a conversation in that vision. That requires too much faith.

But I choose to think that progress is being made. Day before yesterday when I tidied up the bathroom, I just went about it, thinking no more than people are so messy. I did not feel the pent-up rage that would get me by the throat at such a time in my old life, or wish the things no mother could wish on her children. I didn’t even feel sick at the thought that this much vomit can only be possible from drugs or drink in the amount that gets people into serious trouble.

Sam is now at a supermarket. I know this because he gets into a uniform that has Economart on the breast pocket. Sometimes I see coupons scattered on his bedroom floor. I want to ask him, did they give you these or did you take them? Naturally I don’t. If he does not come home looking like a thundercloud, it’s a good day. It’s like this too with Sing. She has tattoos now all over her back. She has bags under her eyes the size of gunny sacks. When I wake up to go to the toilet and smell cigarette smoke and see the rim of light under her door, I know it’s one of those nights again. I lie still as a corpse willing that she stays home until dawn. Some mornings she will get up and put on her school uniform. I am careful not to allow tears to fall on such days. I have not broken my vow to never ask, what about those days when you disappear for days on end. Her principal called me in last week. The fact that she even calls me in is a concession to the fact that we once shared the same vocation. The common language we had is now alien and menacing. Nancy, if this carries on, you understand—she was kind enough not to finish the sentence. I want to cry but hold it all in.

It seems such a small thing to do, for all the things I could not.

* * *

When we sit across from each other I want to tell you all these things. I want to ask you, do you think about what’s happening at home? The last visit I wanted to say, to that high blank wall of your face, you don’t have to receive a visitor just because everyone else does. But I know that even getting this message to you is trying to shout across continents. So we sit there, you looking at some point over my shoulder, I looking at other families. Does it occur to you that families visit: that your friend, the one with the scar over one eye, the one who nods at me now, his children come with their husbands and wives; that the other one, the friendly-looking one with a beard, has a niece who comes with her children? Families. Does it give you a pang that your son and daughter do not come, that your wife and you sit in quiet desperation for visit’s end? It’s now the 15th week. Yes, I counted. That too I have to figure out. Why I count.

* * *

It was Ah Lui’s daughter’s wedding last week. When Ah Lui asked me, I don’t know who was more shocked: Ah Lui, at my acceptance, or me, hearing myself say Of course, I’d love to be there, congratulations! Poor Ah Lui, as soon as the words left her mouth, I could hear her breath suspend, hear her desperation. Thank you Ah Lui but I have another dinner that night. Yes, that would have been the right answer in return for such an unspeakably kind and generous gesture from an utterly decent and duty-bound relative. What battles it must have cost her. (How can you cut her off just because her husband’s in jail? I can hear her say.) But I could not help myself.

I had such a good time. I made sure to put on my best dress—the designer dress I splurged a half-month’s bonus on, you remember, the purple one with the white ribbon at the collar—and got my hair done. I put on the two gold bangles I wore for our wedding. And I put $100 in a red packet for Ah Lui’s girl. When the couple went around the tables for the wedding toasts and the men gamely set aside their F&N orange for brandy, something inside me said, At last! I said, give me some too, no, no, more! protesting the timid drops. I could almost hear the space opening up around me in that split-second of silence. Here she is finally at her final disgrace. But that was not the best part.

* * *

Ah Lui had said, Bring the children. This is the best part: I didn’t even bother mentioning it to them.

And it got better too. When it became clear that something was on, with me coming home one day, my white hair restored to youthful black, washing and pressing a dress no one remembers, neither of them asked me anything. And I got happier as the day of the wedding dinner approached. I would be free for one night. Free of my life. Free of accountability.

Perhaps this is why people get high on drugs. Not just the desire to be freed of shackles, but also from the desire to be truthful, and daring others to be truthful. There is something liberating in refusing to participate in the careful show we call civilised behaviour. Why pretend? We scrutinise each other from the time our first consciousness forms. And for you and me, judgement was passed even before the verdict was read. The wedding dinner just confirmed this. I saw their confusion and it made me glad, to see their eyes darting to and from me, to receive their awkward greetings as thoughts skittered after one another in their eyes. How do you handle it? Why did she turn up? Ah Lui is an idiot. Do you commiserate with her? Ask after the children? But how can you ask, they are a mess.

You would have been proud of me. I did not wait. I jumped right in with a bright chatter I didn’t even know I possessed. I remembered whose children were away, whose were how old, whose had given them grandchildren. You used to criticise me for the way I kept old paper bags, smoothing out their creases so thoroughly, hoarding so unnecessarily, leftover gift wrap paper, ribbons. Like paper bags, information too is subject to need and recall. In the face of so much chirpiness, sympathy would have been an insult. You could almost smell the relief at their having been saved the uncomfortable guilt-cum-obligation to put poor Nancy at ease. Nancy was clearly on her way, they could tell each other. Strong woman, to go from school vice-principal to grocery store cashier.

* * *

I think I must be getting perverse as I grow older, delighting in making people feel awkward and uncomfortable. Oh you don’t know, Huat Seng, how much older I have grown. I feel ready for my coffin. But this is not about me.

* * *

Yesterday when I tidied Sing’s room and emptied her ashtray, I counted 35 stubs. On a usual morning there’s rarely less than 30. And I found a used condom in Sam’s jeans pocket. I am beyond wanting to guess what happened, and no longer feel the urge to sit one or the other down. There is only one thing I wish for, and that is that you are in my place, seeing, living, breathing every day all these things, which carry on with a force and life of their own. Needing no external agency.

* * *

We have never spoken about it, have we? Not from the time they came for your things, through the time they came for you, through those days when your photo appeared in the papers for so many mornings in a row I stopped counting. I am sorry I could not play the dutiful wife ready for the world’s pity or approbation. We both know my appearance would have been the ultimate lie, worse than the lie that was passed off as your life. Our life.

And now that we sit across each other, gutted and mute, I have this crazy fancy that you hear my question in the silence, and secretly laugh at the ridiculous simplicity of it. What made you do it? The question that is a windblown, spindly thing built on ashen remains, a hut in a clearing atop a village piled on bones. The question that is just another way of asking, What did you not see in your life, which leads to When did the way you see things change?

Pursuing it will take me right back to the path we took together, make me comb it to see where the sign was missed, the wrong turning overlooked. Do you remember that holiday we took, when we had to drive through all that countryside? Watch for signs, you kept saying. There were cliffs everywhere. I have to drive, you just watch for signs. And there were so many of them with little images of slopes and small stones falling off cliffs.

But truly I need to know: how did you manage that quantum leap from respectable wage-earner, husband, father, to an accused charged with sex with a minor? Can a man’s nature alter so suddenly or was there something deep down always there, burning in secret like peat fire?

So you see what I am getting at: that was a long journey, Huat Seng. A very long road to travel to arrive at a tawdry hotel room with a child. There, I have said the word. Child. I don’t care what goes on in the internet about her, I care that it was you. I care that there were signs along the way: steep cliff, rocks, sharp bend ahead. I care that you saw them, even though you will hate me for this statement.

And I pursue this path because I need to place myself in all this. Where did I miss my signs, our signs? There surely has to be an explanation, even if as banal as, There are no such things as signs. That evil just happens, as lightly and randomly as rocks will tumble down a hillside, a poisonous creature sink its sting.

Or can evil lurk, peaceable and expectant beneath the stolid surface of a stolid marriage?

* * *

Childhood sweethearts. How did you feel reading that description of us? In print, laid bare, our life was desecrated. After that, and many pills later I got calmer and then I realised: I was also a part of the desecration. By my omissions, Huat Seng. I simply could not see: and then, I would not see.

And I got my punishment. It was not even all those columns and reams devoted to your hearing that was the worst of it.

It was the pity. The awkwardness and embarrassment of my colleagues, of relatives like Ah Lui. Their repressed, bewildered looks. We became a two-headed beast battling on opposing fronts: the public front, with you out there, and the private one, with me not knowing night from day. Neither of us saw that the price that we supposed ourselves to be paying then was the least of it. That we were already paying long before you found yourself in a cheap hotel room with a child with pert breasts and a tight rear. A debt with no repayment.

* * *

And Huat Seng, although we will very likely never say these words to each other, was there not actually the very whisper of relief when this whole thing blew up? That now, now at last, it had been put outside your power to have any say in the matter?

* * *

The best part of my life now is the sheer anonymity. I am Madam Chia or Auntie Chia. They are all respectful and for the large part, extremely kind, even if a bit brusque at times when I jam the till or overlook something in totting up the accounts for the day. If they know who I am they are kind enough to affect ignorance. I strive for reliability, my only claim to self-respect these days. 7:45 I am punched in, doing the checklists and finishing up what paper work that was left the day before. At 8:45 I take my place at the till, unlock it, and then the day unfurls: tinned food, toilet paper rolls, domestic sundries all trundle on the belt before me as I beep them against the register. There is something so soothing in the unthinking routine of it all. A relief to be spared the great responsibility of other people’s lives. We share our breaks, sometimes one or other of the younger ones tells me his or her problems. Their initial reserve has dissipated in the face of my acceptance of my role: semi-skilled in my task, subject to occasional reprimand, but in all respects a mild and harmless middle-aged woman trying to put food on the table.

Hardly a woman whose husband has been found guilty in a sex case involving a girl just a few years older than his own daughter.

And certainly not a woman who might be complicit in it.

* * *

I threw away all our photo albums over the last two weeks. It was surprisingly easy. I sorted them out by dates and made neat piles: the dating and university albums; the wedding albums; the children’s albums. Then I borrowed the office shredder. There were so many bags after I was done. I did not throw them in the rubbish bin. I drove to the wholesale centre and piled the bags into large bins reeking of rotted shellfish and vegetables. Never was a stench more liberating. It was the smell of freedom. After that (it was a Saturday) I went home and cooked and then had dinner on my own, in front of another TV drama. I don’t know where the two were. But I was so glad they were out. When I heard Sam’s key turn in the door, I felt my happiness disperse like a child who in the middle of fun is told, ok, time to pack up. I washed my plate, went to the bedroom and locked the door, without a glance at his expression. Deriving thereby a pathetic modicum of self-esteem that the choice was of volition rather than necessity.

So you see, even coming to see you, and us being this way, is a huge relief for me. There is no pretence anymore. And I suspect even though you and I barely look at each other, we both know why this must continue until some supervening event (whose form remains a mystery to me).

Because facing each other is our just sentence. I see in you all the things I failed in; and I know that is also the reason for your reaction last week. I saw you flinch before the tart’s makeup I put on. It was cruel and deliberate and I had great pleasure when you looked at me in horror. I had the idea when I finally overcame my revulsion of Youtube. There she was, the living obscenity of a child designed for men’s appetites. That was, I admit, a low blow, and gave me my small and pathetic victory, which was the sight of your shock and powerlessness. Yes, I was taunting you. But with my pain, not your guilt.

Because I need to know, who came first: that brazen young girl or your daughter?

Yes, Huat Seng. I have always sensed that you must have been unspeakably relieved to have been sent here. It spared you coming home, not just in terms of having to face yourself in the mirror of our grief, but also in seeing that the present was no more than the past disguised.

* * *

My first reaction when they came for you was: have I not been a good wife?

Do you see, in this self-reproach what tradition, what steep lore, what encoded Pavlovian reflex there is?

So I did the time. I can’t remember telling you about the stomach pumping in hospital the day I almost drowned in my vomit but for the persistence of Mrs. Chia. Poor woman, she held her finger to the bell and would not let go, from sheer anxiety at our cars being in and not a sign of life in our home, and you daily in the papers and some reporter having the nerve to ask her for an interview.

Oh the kindness of strangers, Huat Seng. From the hospital people, to Mrs. Chia who trailed after the ambulance, her carrot cake a lumpen mess on our porch, to the hospital nurses, who spoke with their eyes, a kind hand on my shoulder, a tender pressure on my arm, guessing at what it must have taken a woman to swallow a vial of pills.

They were not to know it was the second time it was happening.

* * *

Last night there was a police TV drama. They called in the police shrink for the perpetrator. The shrink said, Oh, he is suffering from something from his childhood.

What luxury! To find after having committed such terrible things (some manslaughter thing), to find yourself invested with the right to so much understanding!

That night of the wedding when Uncle Beng said to Ah Lui’s girl, all fluffy and billowing next to her groom, Wah, you both engineers, so well suited, I felt the cruelty and irony of that remark. Weren’t we both told that at our wedding? Now, as we sit across each other, that remark is the blade in my stomach. Indeed we are well-suited. You, the perpetrator, me, the enabler.

* * *

The signs were all there, weren’t they? How our daughter would avoid you. How she would quickly say, Never mind, if she wanted something of me and I was too busy to give it to her, take her spelling, drive her to tuition class. The air of studied imperviousness, the blank look whenever your name was mentioned. If this were some show, like that TV drama, here is the point when the mother should say, Oh, I should have known.

And that is why we shall never erase the image of each other’s face across a clear space of countertop for as long as we live.

Because we both knew what we were letting in those many years ago. And did nothing.

You because it was not in your power.

Me, because I did not want to see it.

* * *

But now I see it. Yes.

* * *

What would have happened if I had not come home? What if I had been detained by some changed or delayed class? This thought always freezes me.

I came home worrying about two feverish children and a husband nursing stomach flu and if the chicken porridge was enough. I came home to find you lying beside her amongst her toys, nuzzling her stomach. Checking for spots, you said.

How long had you been that way before? And what else since?

Could I have foreseen in those few frozen moments, that we would all be sucked in by an undertow? That averted look of yours, your hurried, mumbled excuse as you scrambled off her. It dragged us all in. And I must live with this, that I legitimised it. Yes, Daddy is just checking. Because daddy loves you.

Making light of our child’s bewilderment.

In such ways are we participants in crimes against the innocent. Yes Huat Seng, your deed showed up my innate worthlessness in all its unforgiveable entirety. The true banality of evil.

So you see, what you were charged with was just a natural progression of that afternoon. Yes, why not look truth in the eye. The child was just an outlet, and not your first victim. And it wasn’t lost on me that from certain angles she looked so much like our daughter. That was why I could not go to court and play the stoic wife. You had gotten away lightly. Too lightly. And so did I.

And why don’t I say these things to you when we sit across the table from each other week after week? Because it is irrelevant. Even if nothing had happened that afternoon, the look in your eye contained every intention. The glazed blank opaqueness of a malediction. The hurried way you jumped off our daughter’s stomach, the way your eyes could not meet mine. It told me everything I needed to know.

And in those moments, my hand on the door, saying Yes, Daddy’s just checking, we all forgot about Sam in the next room. Sam, everywhere, who was not deaf, who was older and would have seen things, puzzled over them and then eventually learned them.

We never saw that, did we, as we played out our make believe and sealed our collusion? We gave it all acceptable names: hormones. Moods. Teenage rebellion. The turned face. The surliness. The avoidance. The growing silences, the going off to friends’ places, the excuses from family dinners. We turned away from what was before us. The maw of the beast down which we were sliding.

We had exculpated ourselves like a pair of thieves.

* * *

Do you remember the signs along